Not necessarily for sound, on industrial fans and drives, we can program in skip frequencies to avoid any resonance issues in the system. I’ve never done it for noise reduction. But I do some tweaks for efficiency and power consumption reduction. There’s some wild industrial design stuff out there, and in the end, it’s because it provides something the customer wants. I won’t go into specifics, but you can design the same components the same for multiple manufacturers and do some slightly different things in its construction to give the vibe the OEM wants, or to fix some inherent characteristics in the manufacturers platform. It’s REALLY cool when you think about it. Sorry to be so vague, but I have to be.

I definitely want more storage, and will be using external disks with it.

This is a valid point, but I also want to keep it on macOS for the AirMessage apps. And it feels like the Intel Mac’s are all on life support right now. But a used Mini is much cheaper on eBay than a new one!

I thought parallels could run Windows 11 ARM version? What about QEMU?

Thank you much, that’s my biggest worry.

My mid 2012 has been upgraded to the max. It’s got the 2.9GHz dual core i7, 16 GB RAM, 4 tb of storage thanks to a data doubler, and is running MacOS 14.4. I’ve been getting kernel panics lately, and sometimes struggle getting it to turn on, I’m afraid it’s getting time to retire it. It’s unfortunate, but this has been an outstanding laptop for me. I dual boot windows and macos on it. Perhaps I’ll put fedora on it shortly and see if it behaves any better.

As others have said, Inductive Automation 's Ignition is a fine SCADA platform that runs on Linux. I used it for years until my employer decided we should get rid of Ignition and use OSISoft Pi for data visualization. It’s a ridiculous idea, as they are different products with different use cases, but I lost that argument and have been told to drop it. Still salty, all those development hours and useful tools gone.

macOS: Lack of official support for models that are still relevant. I’ve got the last MacBook Pro that was fully upgradable, a mid 2012 model with a dual core 4th gen i7. You can upgrade everything in it, and I have. 16gb of RAM, two disks, one an SSD, and the other a large HDD. But the latest official version of MacOS is Catalina. But I’m running Ventura on it now with no issues. And in similar respect, no upgradability at all of the new Macs after purchase. It’s very anti consumer.

Regarding Atom, the x7-z8700 in my surface 3 caused problems for a while, and I’m not sure it’s still 100% in Linux, and it’s been out for ages.